Deva Woodly

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I am interested in how democratic politics actually happens in the contemporary context. I approach this broad interest in a non-traditional way. Most American political science focuses inquiry on institutions, choice, and decision-making. By contrast, I focus my attention on the ways that public meanings define the problems that the polity understands itself to share as well as the range of choices that citizens perceive to be before them. Questions that focus on the way that public meanings shape our politics require a careful engagement with public discourse, like that found in newspapers, shared through social networks online, or spoken in the meeting houses of civic and social movement organizations. These discourses provide an empirical record of what members of the polity acknowledge as politically valuable as well as clues to the logics that people commonly use to associate their beliefs and values with the problems that they recognize in the world as they find it, imbricated as it is with all the structural, institutional, group-based and affective elements of life and politics. This observation of the central practical importance of discourse to democratic politics as we actually experience it as members of the polity, leads me to utilize methodologies, both theoretical and empirical, that reveal political discourse as a practical source of information, including statistical examinations of discursive content and theoretical analyses of the meanings unearthed therein.

“Theorizing Social Movements as Democratic Institutions.” Contemporary Political Theory (2018) “The Importance of Public Meaning to Political Persuasion.” Perspectives on Politics 16, no. 1 (2018): 22-35. “#BlackLivesMatter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements: What Active Citizenship Can Look Like and What It Can Accomplish.” In #Charlottesville: Before and Beyond, edited by Christopher Howard-Woods, Colin Laidley, and Maryam Omidi, 181-191. New York: Public Seminar Books (2018). Originally published in Uprising 13/13, Columbia University Center for Contemporary Critical Thought Series Seminar Blog (November 1, 2017). “The Joy of Us: Identity Work and the Movement for Black Lives.” In What Now? On Future Identities, edited by Kristin Chappa and Anne Barlow. London: Black Dog Publishing (August, 2018).